Successful marketing of products (including goods and/or services) relies upon many factors; however, a predominant factor is word of mouth, or the effect of interpersonal communication. Word of mouth marketing relies upon the recommendation or opinion of a trusted colleague, friends, or relatives of the consumer. Word of mouth marketing is effective yet is difficult for merchants and brand owners to successfully perform.
Various attempts have been made to determine consumer social networks, and hence to promote or influence word of mouth marketing through particularly influential members of such networks. However, these attempts have generally not been successful, despite (or rather because of) the massive amount of available data. Thus, merchants frequently attempt instead to analyze and predict the behavior of each consumer individually, and hence disregard such connections.
There are many efforts organizations employ to use the power of word of mouth.
Undercover marketing—commercially motivate people to recommend a certain product (personally or through internet chat rooms, talkbacks etc.) or use the product or service in public.
Creating buzz—Certain companies use word of mouth advertising agencies to identify opinion leaders and use them to spread word of mouth.
These opinion leaders are recruited one by one through web site or personal interviews.
Targeting trend setters—Certain companies send a product to several A-list trend setters to spread the word. For example, the book “the da Vinci code” was sent to 10,000 industry trend setters for them to create and amplify the word of mouth around the book.
Thus, none of the above attempted solutions successfully uses social networks to determine how to target word of mouth marketing to influential members of such networks.